The Poems of Madison Cawein, Volume 5 (of 5) / Poems of meditation and of forest and field

There is a sorrow in the wind to-night
That haunteth me; she, like a penitent,
Heaps on rent hair the snow’s thin ashes white,
And moans and moans, her swaying body bent.

And Superstition, gliding softly, shakes
With wasted hands, that vainly grope and seek,
The rustling curtains; of each cranny makes
Wild, ghostly lips that, wailing, fain would speak.

QUESTIONINGS

Now that wan sunsets, wintery
With icy gold, paint bleak the sky;
Now nights are starless utterly,
And snow and sleet cut moaning by,
One’s memory keeps one company,
And sorrow puts its “when” and “why.”

Such inquisition, when alone,
Leads on to ways of doubt and dread,
Despair has miled with many a stone,
Carved with the faces of our dead,
Stamped on whose brows we read, “Unknown!
No further look, nor seek to tread.”

And, oh! that weariness of soul
That leans upon our dead, the clod
And air have taken, as a whole,
Through some mysterious period!—
Life! with its questions of control!
Death! with its unguessed laws of God!

FRAGMENTS

IV

Night is a grave physician, who contrives
The drug of sleep to heal day’s bruises with,
The drug of death for life’s delirium.—

V

On lost expanses of a phantom land
Life stands; and, overhead, one sinister star,
A baleful beacon, burns: heav’n seems a hand
Of jeweled darkness pointing her her way,
Mournful, through shadows of lugubrious hills
And rising tempest, to a house, a shape
Placid and pale and silent utterly.

VI

O undivulging, unresponsive fate,
Is gold another name for power and crime?
Life, dust long dedicated unto death?
And death? is it all darkness without light?
Whereto all things go groping, love and joy
And beauty, glow-worms, flickering each its spark?
Precious as gold does anything avail?
Steadfast as tablets of the eternal stars,
What deeds of man, when time hath touched them, last?

DEITY

No personal! No God divinely crowned
With gold and raised upon a golden throne,
Deep in a golden glory,—whence he nods
Man this or that,—and little more than man!

Thus I divine Him: When the soul, refined
Through love and wisdom through a thousand years,
Shall mount as pure intelligence and pierce
The separate cycles singing under God,—
Their iridescent evolutions orbed
Of wild electric splendor,—it shall see
(Through God-propinquity become a god)
Resplendencies of empyrean light
Swift-lightening out of spheric harmonies:
Prisms and facets of ten million beams
Starring a crystal of wild-rainbowed rays:
And in it—eyes: of burning sapphire, eyes
Deep as the music of the beautiful:
And o’er the eyes, limpid, hierarchal brows,
As they were lilies of seraphic fire:
Lips underneath of trembling ruby—lips,
Whose smile is light and each expression, song.
In multiplying myriads, forms of fire,
Cherubic faces of intensity,
Waiting His look, that is electric thought,
To work His will, spirits on spirits stand
Circling the Unit, God: Supremity
Creative and eternal.

And from Him
Man’s intellect, detached, expelled and breathed
Exaltant into flesh endowed with soul,—
One sparkle of the Essence clothed with clay,—
Is given to Earth for something more than earth,
Some purpose, some divine development,—
That protoplasmic evolution proves,—
That lifts him upward, heart and soul and mind,
From matter to ideal potencies,
Up to the source and fountain of all mind,
Beauty and truth and everlasting love,
To be resumed and re-absorbed in them—
One more expression of Eternity.

DISENCHANTMENT OF DEATH

Hush! she is dead. Tread gently as the light
Steals in the weary room. Thou shalt behold.
Look:—in death’s ermine pomp of awful white,
Pale passion of pulseless slumber, very cold,
Her beautiful youth!—Proud as heroic might,—
Brought low by him whose touch is shadow and mold.

Old earth she is now: energy of birth
Hath fledged glad wings and tried them suddenly:
The eyes that held have freed their maiden mirth:
The spark of spirit, which made this to be,
Shines in some fairer star than this of Earth,
Some Fairy-star of far eternity.

A sod is this; whence, what were once those eyes,
Will grow blue wildflowers in some happier air!
Some weed with flossy blossoms will surprise,
Haply, some summer with her affluent hair!
Some rose reveal her cheeks: and the wise skies
Will clasp her beauty in some young tree there.

The chastity of death hath filled her so
No dreams of life may reach her in her rest;
No dreams the heart exhausted here below,
Hopes built within the romance of her breast.
Now she will sleep, like music, silent, slow,—
That wakes the buds, to golden life caressed.

The winds of spring, that whisper to the grass;
The rain, that sets the red roots harping; sound,
And gleam and color of the dews that glass
Globes of concentric beauty on the ground;
Shall hint of her; and she herself shall pass,
Like prayer, into each flower with memory crowned.

So, though she’s dead, you see she is not dead:
All things are vocal of her: lost in sleep
She lies: its narrow house the soul hath fled;
Her soul, still near us, haply; while the deep
Remains unvoyaged: waiting to be led
It still delays, held here by us who weep.

We should restrain our anguish;—(merciless,
Albeit it is, and bitter cruel the grave:)—
Grief wrings our dead with more than grief’s distress,
Earth chaining love, bound by the lips that rave.
And curse not death!—Yea, rather let us bless
That conqueror who makes us less a slave!

To principles of passion and of pride;
To sin and circumstance and lust and law!
Slave to all these, like rags now flung aside!—
Wouldst have the soul resume them, and withdraw
From its inheritance, where, as a bride,
It stands arrayed in glory and in awe?

“Unjust”?—God is not. Yea, hast thou not all,
All that thou ever hadst when this dull clay,
Thy well belovéd, made the spiritual
A restless vassal of the night and day?
This hath been thine and is: the cosmic call
Rang through this house, and took its own away.

But man, in selfishness, from its estate,—
Won with what pains and devastating cares,
What bootless battling with resistless fate,
What mailed endeavor with unyielding years,—
Would bar the soul, Heaven grants him here as mate,
And being compelled, returns Heaven’s loan with tears.

SLEEP

Look in my eyes!—Oh, the mild and mysterious
Deeps of thine eyes that are holy with rest!—
Sigh to me! yea, as thy kinsman, imperious
Love, might, with lips that are soft and delirious,
Soft with such comfort as blesses the blessed.
Fold all my soul in the mild and mysterious
Might of thy rest.

All the night for thy love, all the night! while the gladdening
Presence of darkness, as legends of old,
Wraps me in poesy: none of the saddening
Prose of the day that is sad with the maddening
Soul of unrest that is heartless and cold.
All the night for thy love, all the night! and its gladdening
Beauty of old.

Scorn is not thine nor is hate; but the bubbling
Fountains of strength that are youthful as morn’s:
Hurt is not thine of remembrance; nor troubling
Sorrows of waking whose fingers keep doubling—
Pressing on temples life’s cares that are thorns.
Thine are the hours of the stars and the bubbling
Wells of the morns.

Pride and the passions and labors that worry us
Mix with and brutalize; envy and spite
Of the heart; and the griefs of the soul that oft hurry us
On, with the iron of anguish, and bury us,—
Touch them and calm with thy fingers of white.
Make all these passions and pains, that oft worry us,
Night with the night.

Silence hath built thee a mansion, where flowery
Fields of the visions are poppied with dreams;
Where the high mountains of quiet loom showery
Under the stars; and the valleys of bowery
Lotus and moly gleam, misty with streams:
Where slumber’s halcyon waters thrid flowery
Pastures of dreams.

Come to me, Spirit!—Ah, wilt thou not stay for me?
Stay for me! fill me with rest as with prayer!
Mother of hope, let thy touch soothe away for me
All of life’s weariness! make all the day for me
Dim with forgetting! the day and its care!
Come to me! Mix with the soul of me! Stay for me,
Cure me like prayer!

CHATTERTON

“I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride.”
—Wordsworth.

He dreamed of Mendip Hills, and woods
So deep, storm-barriers on the sky
Are not more dark, that rain their floods
From clouds of sullen dye:

And Somerset, where sparsely grew
Gnarled, iron-colored oaks, with rifts,
Between old boughs, of April blue:
Ways where the speedwell lifts

Its bit of heav’n; and, spreading far,—
The gold, the fallen gold of dawn
Held captive in each cowslip’s star,—
The meadows led him on.

Where, round his feet, the lady-smock
And pearl-pale lady-slipper crept;
Where butterflies, pied-wing’d, did rock,
Or, seal-brown, sucked and slept.

O’er which the west shot crooked fire
Athwart a half-moon leaning low;
While one white, arrowy star throbbed higher
In curdled honey-glow.

Was it some elfin euphrasy
That purged his sight and said, “Prepare!
See where the daisies beckon thee;
The harebells ring to prayer?

“Come here and dream! far from the roofs,
The grime and smoke of London Town,
That monster, with its myriad hoofs,
That grinds the poet down!”

Not different from his days our days,
That break the poet’s heart. No love
Or pity after death repays
The soul that failed and strove.

They found him dead his songs beside,
Long stairs above the din and dust
Of life: and that for which he died
Denied him even a crust.

THE SYMPHONY

The soul of love is harmony: as such
All melodies, that with wide pinions beat
Against the heart’s red gateway to the soul,—
That, opening, bids them enter in and sing,—
Are portions of the soul, and while they stay,
Lords of its action molding all at will.

There is a symphony, I know not whose,
That seems to bear my spirit far away,
To regions not of Earth nor yet of Heaven,
Where neither am I I, nor air, nor clay,
My soul, a portion of the waves of song,
Reverberating ’twixt the earth and moon.

First, sweeping marches, loud with martial boast,
Triumphal clamors and the shout of joy,
As when,—in bannered cities, welcoming home,—
Bright ranks of victory and cavalcades
Of splendid battle march to roll of drums
And clang of cymbals and sonorous horns.
Then sudden thunder; adverse hosts of storm;
And lightning cleaving the tempestuous gloom;
Earthquake, and roar of ruin as if Thebes
And Karnac crashed their Titan temples down,
Pillar and groinéd nave and fretted dome,
On all their gods of gold and worshippers.

Then from the wreck, unutterably slow,
An exhalation seems to beat, of sound,
An audible perfume; slowly as the fang
Of dusty gold the lily’s cone puts forth
To drink the sunlight and to lure the bee:
A mist of music, delicate as the shapes
Who ride the rainbow bubbles of the foam
Of mountain cataracts; or, who, heeled with flame,
Wing-tipped with fire, make couriers of the winds,
And, zoned with opal, chariot the morning star.

Then soft complaints that fill the waiting heart
With dreams of love long-cherished; love-dreams found
On morning mountains, splendid with the dawn.
Then tender chords that weigh the eyelids down
With sleep’s pale kisses, softer than the buds
That open to the spring, the kiss of May;
And sweeter than sweet vows of fondest faith
Kept evermore; or looks, whose witchery
Might lure old saints down to the lowest Hell
For one last glance: then notes like haunting eyes,
Great, melancholy eyes of love long lost,
Darker than night, and brimming o’er with dreams;
Or faces, stooping in a silver mist
At Care’s thin brow, and gazing in his eyes,
Sad where he sits before the smouldering logs,
At Yuletide, when the sleet taps on the pane,
And all the loved are gone, and he’s alone,
Alone, save for the memories that rise
Faint in the ashes and the spark-starred smoke.

Then, from these chords, these mortal ecstasies,
Dim as the half-forgotten dreams of youth,
Voices of expectation chorus up,—
The diapason of a mighty choir,—
’Mid organ throbbings, ever beating low
Like the huge heart of Ocean; pulsings wove
Of deep, æolian thunders: and my soul
Seems wafted far beneath the sea of seas,
To chasms and caves of crystal, ocean-carved,
Filled with dark lamentations of the deep,
Deep, dolorous seas, that throb like some vast harp,
Wild, oceanic, and with stormy sighs
Of labyrinthine music shake the world.
One with the tumult,—under circling tiers
Of beryl and chrysoberyl, splashed and hung
Pale with pelagian gems and feathery shells,
And spars of moony radiance,—on I drift,
A voice ’mid voices, chord amid the chords,
A wave, a wild vibration of the strain,
Part of the ray, the rose of melody,
An utterance amid that utterance
Of choral harmony: now rising up,—
As ’twere a spire of silver symphony
Blown from a reed of hollow pearl and fire
By some still spirit dwelling within the moon,—
To the vast vault of echoes: dying now
Down to the underworld of silence, deep
With wild, unburdened sobbings; then, once more,
Sweeping the vault with tumult, like a bird
With maddened wings, that beat and bleed in vain
Against the bars; or like the human soul,
Oppressed and bulked within its cage of clay,
That longs and strains to burst its bonds and soar.

Then tones that shape before my inner sight
The moonlit gardens of the spirit, Sleep,
Far on a star man’s eyes have never seen:
White Sleep, who leads me ’mid her poppies, weighed
With dewy slumber; from whose chalices
She culls white dreams to lay on human hearts
In pearly clusters sparkling now with tears
And now with smiles; the blossoms of her soul.
She, on her shadowy pinions, winging high,
Bears me from pole to pole of her white star,
The continents like clouds beneath our feet,
The seas like mists; then drops me, meteor-like,
A million leagues, through all the gulfs of God,
Down, down to Earth again; a sound of stars,
Streaming from burning orbits into night,
About my soul, about my soul like fire.

Oh, then what agony and bitter woe,
Regret and noise of desolation, vast
As when all that one loves is torn away
Forever with “farewell forevermore”!
Oh, strife and panic of impending doom!
Wherein rush by pale brows with tresses torn;
Pale faces browed with raven, rended hair,
That cringe or fly before the wrath of God,
Or stand white-lifted to the bolts of Heaven,
Ploughing the tempest, chasmed with torrent flame
As ’twere with rocking earthquake. All around
Ruin and terror, moans and awful eyes,
Fierce, moveless eyes that seem to curse their God:
Then sounds, as ’twere, of burning tears that fall
Through blinding blackness: then—long thunder strokes
As of a bell that tolls “’Tis Judgment Day!”
Sonorous bell-beats heard through night and storm,
O’er hands high lifted as it were in prayer
Or battling with their doom: still tolling on,
The knell of dying Earth and of the Dawn;
The Dawn that will not break, that comes no more;
Never again; the beautiful, wild Dawn,
The young, the holy, radiant and wonderful,
First born of Heaven’s children, daughters of Light:
The Rose of God, the dream and youth of Day,
Whom Night hath slain and Darkness laid away,
Crying, “No more shall she awake the world!
No more! no more!—The Dawn, aurora-wreathed,
Lies dead with all her flow’rs! and Death and I,
Darkness and Death, Lords of Oblivion,
Heart-shaking monarchs of the universe,
Throned on the ruins of the world, shall rule
From everlasting unto everlasting now!—
Look on our faces, Nations, and despair!”

A SONG FOR OLD AGE

Now nights grow cold and colder,
And north the wild vane swings,
And round each tree and boulder
The driving snow-storm sings—
Come, make my old heart older,
O memory of lost things!

Of Hope, when promise sung her
Brave songs, and I was young,
That banquets now on hunger
Since all youth’s songs are sung;
Of Love, who walks with younger
Sweethearts the flowers among.

Ah, well! while Life holds levee,
Death’s ceaseless dance goes on.
So let the curtains, heavy
About my couch, be drawn—
The curtains, dark and heavy,
Where all shall sleep anon.

“WHEN THE WINE-CUP AT THE LIP”

When the wine-cup at the lip
Slants its ruby fire,
O’er its level, while you sip,
Have you marked the finger-tip
Of the god Desire slip,
Of the god Desire?
Saying—“Lo, the hours run!
Live your day before ’tis done!”

When the empty goblet lies
At the ended revel,
In the glass, the wine-stain dyes,
Have you marked the hollow eyes
Of a mocking Devil rise,
Of a mocking Devil?
Saying—“Lo, the pleasure’s done!
Look on me whose hour’s begun!”

THE BETTER LOT

Her life was bound to crutches: pale and bent,
But smiling ever, she would go and come:
For of her soul God made an instrument
Of strength and comfort to an humble home.

Better a life of toil and slow disease
That Love companions through the patient years,
Than one whose heritage is loveless ease,
That never knows the blessedness of tears.

PASSION

The wine-loud laughter of indulged desire
Upon his lips, and, in his eyes, the fire
Of uncontrol, he takes in reckless hands,—
And interrupts with discords,—the sad lyre
Of Love’s deep soul, and never understands.

THE TROGLODYTE

In ages dead, a troglodyte,
At the hollow roots of a monster height,—
That grew from the heart of the world to light,—
I dwelt in caverns: Over me
Were mountains older than the moon;
And forests, vaster than the sea,
And gulfs, that the earthquake’s hand had hewn,
Hung under me. And late and soon
I heard the Dæmon of Change that sighed
A cosmic language of mystery;
Where I sat silent, primeval-eyed,
With the infant Spirit of Prophecy.

Gaunt stars glared down on the Titan peaks;
And the gaunter glare of the cratered streaks
Of the sunset’s ruin heard condor shrieks:
The roar of cataracts hurled in air,
And the hurricane, laying its thunders bare,
And the rush of battling beasts,—whose lair
Was the antechamber of nadir-gloom,—
Were my outworld joys. But who can tell
The awe of the depths whence rose the boom
Of the iron rivers that fashioned Hell!

THE EVANESCENT BEAUTIFUL

Day after day, young with eternal beauty,
Pays flowery duty to the month and clime;
Night after night erects a vasty portal
Of stars immortal for the march of Time.

But where are now the glory and the rapture,
That once did capture me in cloud and stream?
Where now the joy, that was both speech and silence?
Where the beguilance that was fact and dream?

I know that Earth and Heaven are as golden
As they of olden made me feel and see;
Not in themselves is lacking aught of power
Through star and flower—something’s lost in me.

“Return! return!” I cry, “O visions vanished,
O voices banished, to my soul again!"—
The near Earth blossoms and the far skies glisten,
I look and listen, but, alas! in vain.

THE HIGHER BROTHERHOOD

To come in touch with mysteries
Of beauty idealizing Earth,
Go seek the hills, grown green with trees,
The old hills wise with death and birth.

There you may hear the heart that beats
In streams, where music has its source;
And in wild rocks of mossed retreats
Behold the silent soul of force.

Above the love that emanates
From human passion, and reflects
The flesh, must be the love that waits
On Nature, whose high call elects

None to her secrets save the few
Who hold that facts are far less real
Than dreams, with which all facts indue
Themselves approaching the ideal.

TO A WINDFLOWER

I

Teach me the secret of thy loveliness,
That, being made wise, I may aspire to be
As beautiful in thought, and so express
Immortal truths to Earth’s mortality;
Though to my soul ability be less
Than ’tis to thee, O sweet anemone.

II

Teach me the secret of thy innocence,
That in simplicity I may grow wise;
Asking from Art no other recompense
Than the approval of her own just eyes;
So may I rise to some fair eminence,
Though less than thine, O cousin of the skies.

III

Teach me these things; through whose high knowledge, I,—
When Death hath poured oblivion through my veins,
And brought me home, as all are brought, to lie
In that vast House, common to serfs and Thanes,—
I shall not die, I shall not utterly die,
For beauty born of beauty—that remains.